Archive for December, 2011

When you download information for an entry and no cover image is included (or you don’t like the one that came along), this is how you can search for alternatives.

Ctrl-click (right-click) anywhere in the cover image well at the bottom of the main window to bring up the contextual menu like this:

Then choose either “Download from” and select a site to search or choose “Open Google Images”. (In DVDpedia you will also see the option to “Open MoviePosterDB”.)

When you choose “Download from” and select a site, the program will search for a cover image on that particular site and download the first cover image returned.

When you choose “Open Google Images”, the web view will open and start a search on Google Images for the selected title. To make sure you get the correct image the search will also include the format or platform depending on the Pedia you’re using.

When the window with your search results appears, click on the image you want and then click on the ‘See Full Size Image’ link at the top of the window to see a larger version of the image.

Now ctrl-click (right-click) anywhere on that larger image and select ‘Make Cover’ from the contextual menu that appears to make it the cover of your selected entry. (Or if you’re impatient like Conor, just click and drag the image over into the image well.)

The new statistics in 5.0 use a monochrome pallet of blues to blend in with the muted tones of Lion. A few have asked for the bright colors of before. Since our programs are based on a number of open technologies, in this case HTML and CSS to render the statistics, the colors can be customized with a little CSS knowledge.

Open the program’s package: ctrl-click the program icon for a contextual menu to find “Show Package Contents”, then navigate to the /Contents/Frameworks/Pediabase.framework/Resources/statistics.html. This file contains the base for building the final statistics view. Open the file in a text editor to change the colors (TextEdit requires the use of the ‘Open’ command to select the “Ignore Rich Text” option, otherwise it opens looking like a web page).

At the top of the file there is a section of CSS that defines the colors:

The color classes are still named after the old color scheme. What you want to change here are the odd looking hex values, “#263e6d”. The first one on each line represents the top color and the bottom color of the bar. To help select new colors and create a gradient you can use ColorZilla’s gradient editor a handy website that will let you pick a color from a palette and produce the bit of code that you need to copy.

Click on one of the stops on the bottom of the color bar, then click on the color well to change the color. Once you have established the color you would like to use for a bar, copy the -webkit-gradient declaration from the code on the left, the highlighted section and replace the above color:

Repeat four times for each color bar and save the file. You are all set now with new eye-popping colors for your statistics.

For simplicity here are similar colors to what we used to have with version 3 and 4 of the Pedias, so you can copy paste them directly into the template.

If you do change any of the colors be sure to make a copy of the statistics.html file outside of the program bundle. Since the file resides within the program it gets updated when you download a new version. With a copy of the file, you can drop it in as a replacement to set your custom colors again.